LITTLE ROCK (AP) — Snow, sleet and freezing rain pushed through Arkansas on Tuesday, creating treacherous roads, closing schools and leaving tens of thousands of people without electricity across the state.

The state's largest utility, Entergy Arkansas, said it would take two to three days to restore power to the 42,000 customers left in the dark Tuesday. Other utilities reported several thousand more outages statewide, and the number was expected to grow overnight because of gusty winds knocking trees into ice-coated power lines.

At least one death has been attributed to the weather. Arkansas State Police say 36-year-old Jeffery Dee Buck of Des Arc was killed when he lost control of his vehicle on an icy Interstate 40 bridge just east of Little Rock and crashed into trees. Freezing rain was falling at the time of the crash, police said.

Major highways in northwest and central Arkansas were clear Tuesday evening, though there were some ice patches. Roads also appeared passable in northeastern Arkansas, but Raymond Cain, owner of Ray J's Garage and Wrecker Service in Hoxie and Newport, said he was concerned about roads refreezing as temperatures dropped overnight.

But he said state crews did a good job keeping the roadways clear; the state Highway and Transportation Department came under criticism for being slow to clear roads in northern Arkansas during an earlier snowstorm.

"The state (highway) department did a good job keeping everything salted and graded off," Cain said.

Schools across central and northern Arkansas were closed Tuesday, including the state's major universities. Schools in northwest Arkansas will remain shuttered Wednesday. And more wintery precipitation was expected later this week, with snow chances across north and central Arkansas starting Wednesday and running into Friday.

Temperatures on Wednesday could crawl into the 20s in northern Arkansas and 30s in the central and southern part of the state, National Weather Service forecaster Charles Dalton said. But he noted that the clouds Tuesday night would help.

"The cloud cover will combat temperatures falling through the floor," Dalton said. But he said by Wednesday night, "the bottom will drop out of it (with) single digits in the north and 20s further south."

But dangerously frigid weather is forecast for northwest Arkansas, where the low in Fayetteville was 3 degrees on Wednesday and 6 degrees on Thursday, with highs in the teens both days, according to the weather service. The area is forecast to warm up to a high of 33 degrees on Saturday.

The cold is expected to spread across the state, bringing lows in the teens to central Arkansas.

The weather was also hampering the ongoing search for an Arkansas Forestry Commission pilot who vanished, along with his plane, while searching for possible wildfires on Friday in western Arkansas. Crews are searching for Jake Harrell and the Cessna 210 single-engine plane across about 400,000 acres of rugged wilderness.